wards from the ambulance cars up steep gangways to the decks
and cabins of hospital ships. They were summoned by telephone at all
hours. They toiled in the grey light of early dawn. They sweated at
noonday. Soaked and dripping they bent their backs to their burdens
in storm and rain. They went long hours without food. They lived
under conditions of great discomfort. It was everybody's business to
curse and "strafe" them. I do not remember that any one ever gave
them a word of praise.

It was the camp, of all that I was ever in, which seemed to offer the
richest yield to the gleaner of war stories. I have always wanted to
know what that retreat from Mons felt like to the men who went
through it. We are assured, and I do not doubt it, that our men never
thought of themselves as beaten. What did they think when day after
day they retreated at top speed? Of what they suffered we know
something. How they took their suffering we only guess. I hoped when
I made friends with those men to hear all this and many strange tales
of personal adventures.

But the British soldier, even of the new army, is strangely
inarticulate. The men of the old army, so far as concerns their
fighting, are almost dumb. They would talk about anything rather
than their battles. There was a man in the Life Guards who had
received three wounds in one of the early cavalry skirmishes. He
wanted to talk about cricket, and told me stories about a church
choir in which he sang when he was a boy.

There was a Coldstream Guardsman. I never succeeded in finding out
whether he was in the famous Landrecies fight or not. The most he
would do in the way of military talk was to complain, privately, to
me of the lax discipline in the camp, and to compare the going of his
comrades from the camp to the quay with the marching of the
Coldstreamers on their way to relieve guard at Buckingham Palace.
There was an old sergeant from County Down who was more interested in
growing vegetables--we had a garden--than anything else, and a
Munster Fusilier who came from Derry, of all places, and exulted in
the fact that his sons had taken his place in the regiment.

At first this curious reticence was a disappointment to me. It is
still a wonder. I am sure that if I had been one of the "Old
Contemptibles" I should talk of nothing else all my life. But I came
to see afterwards that if I had heard battle stories I should never
have known the men. The centre of interest of their l